THE FORTIES

While many of the actresses of the 1930s were virtual goddesses, World War II started a vogue for more approachable women, who might be categorized as girls next door.

These could range from June Allyson to Betty Hutton, Teresa Wright to Donna Reed. I’ve always suspected that MGM’s Andy Hardy films played a big role in developing this public taste. Even though they were modestly budgeted B movies, the Hardy films were hugely popular, and the studio had a policy of dropping newly signed ingénues into them. The acting bar was set low enough that none of them would be embarrassed by her performance; all any of them had to do was be charming and hold the camera.

The other studios saw how young actresses like Judy Garland, Donna Reed, and Lana Turner were embraced by audiences and began developing their own rosters of wholesome starlets. Personally, if I ever saw Donna Reed walking her dog anywhere near my house, I would have immediately moved next door.

To an extent, I’ve been writing about success stories, but the truth of the movie business is that it often attracts people who have innate instabilities, and the experience of the industry only widens the fault lines in their personalities. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t discuss some of the sadder lives that I came across.

Betty Hutton always acted as if she’d been shot out of a cannon—she was the female version of wild men like Mickey Rooney or Harry Ritz or, if you prefer, a WASP version of Carmen Miranda. This was fine when there was a war on and there was a great deal of anxiety to be displaced. But after the war, she seemed out of tempo with the times and her career ended quickly. From a rapid rise to an even more rapid fall, Hutton’s career ran for just about ten years.

But she will remain important in film history if only because in 1944 she made The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek for Preston Sturges, a film that inspires one single question: How did they get away with it?

Hutton plays Trudy Kockenlocker, a small-town girl who really likes soldiers. So much so that she goes on a date, gets drunk, and gets pregnant by a GI whose name she can only remember as something like “Ratzkywatzky.” (Sturges does throw in a quick line about a hurry-up wedding, but if you blink you’ll miss it.)

Trudy needs a husband, and fast, so her mortified father enlists Eddie Bracken, who was the 1940s version of Harold Lloyd—shy, sweet, meaning well at all times, and a bit nervous.

It’s an amazing film—amazingly accomplished, amazingly audacious—and Hutton is remarkable in it. Trudy is far from self-aware, but she’s sincere. In spite of the fact that the movie is a raucous farce, you’re pulling for her if for no other reason than she’d be a great mother. Scattered, but great.

Nobody realized it at the time, but Betty Hutton was doing something extraordinary: embodying female energy unleashed. After the Sturges film, she starred in some successful musicals, stepped in when Judy Garland couldn’t make it through Annie Get Your Gun at MGM, and was one of the stars of DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth.

It was right around the time of the DeMille film that I went over to Paramount to see some friends. When the conversation turned to Betty, I was shown a large sandbag up in the flies of the soundstage that had her name painted on it, with an arrow pointing downward. The stagehands had amused themselves by fantasizing an arcane way of killing Hutton. My friends proceeded to tell me how heartily Hutton was disliked by the studio rank and file, not to mention the front office.

Betty Hutton

It seemed that she was a prima donna, nasty to underlings, and generally a deeply unpleasant person. I was a young actor at the time, and I went away determined to be the kind of actor who the crew liked and respected. Besides that, I was not eager to have a sandbag drop anywhere in my vicinity.

It would take thirty years for the rest of the world, and for women in general, to even begin to catch up to what Betty Hutton was representing in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and by that time she was out of show business and living as a housekeeper in the rectory of a Catholic church in Rhode Island.

It was the culmination of a long slide down that neither she nor anybody else seemed able to stop. She walked out of her Paramount contract when they wouldn’t let her choreographer husband direct one of her pictures, and if that sandbag was any indication, the studio was glad to see her go. A number of TV specials failed, so did a series, and so did her marriages—all four of them—until finally, there was a complete breakdown.

Hutton made only one more public appearance, with my friend Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies. She was so fragile, so tremulous—she looked as though she might collapse at any moment. When she died in Palm Springs in 2007, she was living on Social Security in a very modest apartment and estranged from her three children.

There wasn’t enough money to bury Betty Hutton, so the undertaker called Watson Webb, another friend of mine who had been a premiere film editor at 20th Century Fox. Watson was one of the few editors to have a gold membership card in his union, and was independently wealthy.

The undertaker knew Watson had been in the movie business and thought he might have some idea whom to call. Watson didn’t bother calling anybody; he wrote a check to cover the cost of Betty’s burial. He had never even met her, but he did it because somebody had to take care of a poor woman who had once been a great star. That’s the sort of man he was.

If you wrote the story of Betty Hutton’s life as a novel, nobody would believe it, and it would be so depressing that nobody would want to read it. But for one magical movie, she and Preston Sturges united to make a stunningly original comedy that said something serious about the country and where it would be headed.

 • • • 

I can’t say that I knew Gene Tierney particularly well—I never worked with her, although she was at Fox at the same time I was, and we would chat then and afterward.

Gene was very slender and slightly built; she looked as if a stiff wind could pick her up and deposit her in the next county. But I remember how beautifully she moved—like a dancer, as if invisible wires running through her shoulders carried the weight of her body. She was angelically beautiful.

On-screen, Gene had a serenity that rarely cracked. Even when she played a psychopath in Leave Her to Heaven, she conveyed the complete assurance of someone who was used to having her plans work out. Which was pretty much Gene in her personal life as well. She was born into money and was educated at private schools in Connecticut and Europe. When she told her father that she was interested in becoming an actress, he formed a family-owned corporation to promote her.

She appeared in a couple of Broadway plays and was signed for the movies by Darryl Zanuck by the time she was twenty-one. Gene photographed like a sleek Siamese cat, but didn’t give that impression in person, where her fragility was more apparent. As a person, I found her deliberate to the point of lethargy.

Gene’s great tragedy occurred during World War II. She was on a bond-selling tour when she contracted German measles from a woman who got out of a sickbed to meet her favorite actress. Unfortunately, Gene was pregnant at the time, and her child was born severely retarded. Gene’s husband, Oleg Cassini, did all the right things, supporting his wife and paying for the child’s care, but the marriage broke up.

The birth of Gene’s daughter precipitated a series of mental collapses; she had had at least one breakdown before I arrived at the studio. At one point, she was institutionalized for a year and a half. Scuttlebutt around the studio said that she was at the Menninger Clinic, and the general attitude around Fox was that she was damaged. It was my first experience with an unofficial attitude of surveillance—it was as if the entire studio were watching Gene out of the corner of its collective eye to see if she was going to shatter into a million pieces.

Gene Tierney

At that time, mental illness was not discussed, and stars were kept at a safe remove from media scrutiny. Now, of course, we know that a stint in rehab or even a breakdown can be finessed into a story of personal triumph, a way to reboot a career. But in those days, it was thought that the truth about various issues that were every bit as frequent then as they are now would cause the public’s affection for a given star to disappear overnight.

Darryl Zanuck was caught in a bind. On the one hand, he was an emotional man who would always be supportive when one of his employees was having a problem. On the other, he had to move thirty pictures a year off the Fox stages and into theaters, so his sympathy had something of a clock on it. If you were going to work with troubled people—an apt description of a lot of the inhabitants of show business—you had to walk a fine line.

Gene segued out of the movie business in the mid-1950s, married an oilman, and, except for a few guest appearances, lived the rest of her life in Texas. Everybody who knew her hoped she achieved some measure of peace.

Linda Darnell was another woman who had a sad end. I knew Linda quite well. Obviously, she was strikingly beautiful, but as I got to know her I also discovered her kindness and consideration for other people. My impression of Linda was that she was deeply ambivalent about a career in the movies. The child of a stage mother, she had been entered in beauty contests since she was twelve. Linda looked older than she was, and was playing ingénue roles in the movies by the time she was sixteen or so.

There was a placidity about Linda, but Darryl Zanuck figured out a way to make it work on-screen. She ultimately became a big star because Darryl cast her in huge films that were almost guaranteed to be hits, like Forever Amber. But she also fronted ordinary programmers and sold them with her sincerity and beauty, as well as the occasional project that was actually of high quality, like A Letter to Three Wives and My Darling Clementine.

But by the end of the 1940s, Linda had begun to put on some weight, and she either couldn’t or wouldn’t take it off—the added pounds might have been her passive-aggressive tactic for getting out of a business she never wanted to be in. Darryl dropped her, and her career began a rapid descent. Just as she had seemed to be in her twenties when she was still a teenager, now she seemed to be in her forties while still in her early thirties.

Linda went on to work in occasional TV shows and dinner theater until she died in a house fire in 1965. She deserved better from the movies, and from life.

Just as Betty Grable had been hired by Zanuck as a possible replacement for Alice Faye, so June Haver was hired as a possible replacement for Betty Grable. I got to know June even before I got to Fox, and the story of our meeting gives some indication of her quality as a human being.

When I arrived at Fox, bumptious kid that I was, I asked her if she would come to a party at my high school. She said yes! I danced with her, and nobody took their eyes off us for the entire night. She was a great, classy lady, a terrific person. She was also talented, but her films never had the commercial impact of Grable’s. June was a midwestern girl who had been working on stage since she was six years old. By the time she made her first movie in 1943, she was an all-around talent—she could sing, dance, act, you name it.

Linda Darnell

Her first feature was The Gang’s All Here, the legendary Busby Berkeley movie with Carmen Miranda, the giant bananas, and Alice Faye moaning “No Love, No Nothin’.” Darryl slotted June into a succession of musicals and rural comedies, most of which were quite popular.

But June was unhappy. In 1953, she announced she was retiring from films to become a nun. A short while later, she left the convent and married Fred MacMurray, whose first wife had committed suicide. June and Fred adopted a couple of kids and spent the rest of their lives together. Today their daughter Kate runs an excellent winery that she built on land Fred owned.

Fred and June were extremely happy together. Fred was a great guy with one personality quirk—he was one of the tightest people with a buck I’ve ever met. Watching him leave twenty-five-cent tips constituted one of Hollywood’s most harrowing experiences. Not surprisingly, he became extremely wealthy, but the comfort his money provided was paltry compared to the satisfaction he took in his good marriage. Years after June went with me to the school dance, we worked up a soft-shoe routine for a benefit for St. John’s Hospital. She could still dance.

 • • • 

During the 1930s and 1940s each studio had a specific physical look to its films. You watch thirty seconds of a movie and know immediately whether it was made by MGM (creamy white light, few shadows) or Paramount (heavy diffusion, more grays than blacks or whites), or Warner Bros. (hardly any whites, mostly grays, fairly realistic).

Similarly, the studios employed different types of actresses, a choice that was usually a function of executive preference combined with audience taste. Louis B. Mayer liked his actresses to represent a certain class and dignity, as exemplified by Garbo, Shearer, Loy, MacDonald, and Garson. There were a few exceptions—most notably Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler, token representatives of the working class. In the 1940s, Lana Turner embodied some of Harlow’s working-class sensuality.

It’s safe to say that Bette Davis wouldn’t have lasted three weeks at MGM; her career would have been up for grabs the first time she sailed into Mayer’s office in a state of high dudgeon and upbraided him for his terrible taste in scripts.

Greer Garson, in contrast, was deferential to the studio, and MGM responded by casting her in a string of lavish showcases that proved to be huge hits: Mrs. Miniver, Pride and Prejudice, Random Harvest, Madame Curie, and Mrs. Parkington. Eight of her films paired her with Walter Pidgeon, and they were the most reassuring of screen teams, if a trifle elderly. During World War II, audiences were comforted by their solidity. These films made amazing amounts of money, and Garson was one of the key box office stars of the war years.

Her days of huge hits ended soon afterward, however—the social changes wrought by World War II made her screen character seem insufferably noble, and she was unable or unwilling to add much earthiness to the mixture. By 1947 or so, she began to seem starchy.

But Mayer had given Garson a cast-iron contract, so she kept making expensive but money-losing pictures for MGM well into the 1950s. Greer Garson isn’t spoken of much today, but if you want to understand America just before and during World War II, you need to understand her and the appeal of her genteel goodness.

I met Greer when I was just a boy working at the Bel-Air Stables. She lived right across the street from the stables, and she and Richard Ney, her husband at the time, came over frequently to ride. Because it was wartime, all the grooms were working at airplane factories, so twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids got jobs that would ordinarily have gone to adults. After riding, Greer and Richard would both have tea.

Their marriage raised eyebrows—Ney had played Greer’s son in Mrs. Miniver and was about ten years younger than she was. Richard was a smart and interesting man, but an indistinct actor; with the exception of a couple of for-old-times’-sake appearances for friends, he left the movie business around 1950 to become a successful Wall Street investor.

Years later, I got to know Greer all over again, by which time she was married to a Texas oilman named Buddy Fogelson and was living in Palm Springs near the Eldorado Country Club, which Buddy helped found. After playing Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, Greer dialed back to enjoy life with Buddy and to attend to various philanthropies in and around Texas, which became her adopted home.

Greer Garson

I loved Greer and always thought it curious that the roles she typically played were so far removed from who she actually was as a person. She was at all times very English, with a passion for French poodles and a quite lively, sometimes bawdy sense of humor. Laurence Olivier had discovered her and told me he thought she was very talented. Errol Flynn worked with her in a good MGM movie called That Forsyte Woman and remembered her in surprising terms: “Greer Garson was the first actress I worked with who was fun.” (Take that, Olivia and Bette!)

Offscreen, Greer enjoyed a good time. Like the vast majority of the women I got to know in the movie business, she had innate drive—Hollywood is no place for shrinking violets. When she decided on a course of action, she totally committed to it and found a way to accomplish her goals.

Besides Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, MGM’s other great screen team of this period was Spencer Tracy and Kate Hepburn. They made nine movies together, six of which cast them as a married couple, five of which characterized those marriages as troubled. This was smart filmmaking, because it echoed their very real differences as people—Kate was a bossy New England Yankee, Spence was a phlegmatic midwesterner.

I first met Kate through Spencer Tracy, with whom I became quite close after we made two pictures together (Broken Lance and The Mountain). She was great company, of course, and we became good friends. I asked her to be godmother to my eldest daughter, whom I named Kate in her honor.

Like many actors, Kate enjoyed talking about her flops at least as much as she did the great successes. The key ingredient is having overcome the flops; actors who have been damaged by a catastrophic movie or play don’t enjoy talking about it any more than old soldiers enjoy talking about losing a leg.

When Kate was in a reminiscent mood, a failure like Sylvia Scarlett would get as much time as The Philadelphia Story. As with most huge flops, the former film came to have something of a cult following in later years, which didn’t cut much mustard with Kate. Her attitude was “Where were they when I needed them?” She told me that Pandro Berman, who was running RKO at the time, was so distraught over the resounding flop of Sylvia Scarlett that he told her he never wanted to make another movie with her as long as he lived. He did later, when they were both at MGM, but an actor doesn’t forget moments like that.

Kate was somewhat insulated from the vagaries of show business by the fact that her family was well off. She didn’t need the movie business the way most of the other actresses I’m talking about did: as a means of financial security. But she was an actress through and through—she loved being adored, she expected to be adored, and she was adored.

The self-possession that radiates from Hepburn on-screen was an authentic part of her personality. She didn’t hesitate, she didn’t prevaricate, she didn’t doubt. She generally got what she wanted, at least partially because of her radiant self-confidence. I always found Kate interesting in that she never thought of herself as being beautiful, not at all; she was quite modest about her looks, and it was a genuine modesty, not a calculated affectation intended to provoke reassurance.

What she knew she did have, and what she had absolute self-confidence in, was her personality. She was well aware that there was nobody else remotely like her, at least not in Hollywood, and that her singularity would carry her through even if her talent failed her. You might not like her as an actress, but you could not disregard her as a woman. She counted on that.

Katharine Hepburn

On-screen, Spence and Kate reversed the common explanation about the success of the union of Astaire and Rogers: Spence’s earthiness gave Kate sex, and she gave him class. That they were an offscreen couple from their first movie together in 1942 was irrelevant; Spence was a married man, and the relationship with Kate was occasionally tense.

The two spent a fair amount of time apart, although I don’t believe either of them ever thought of leaving the relationship. On the cellular level, both understood that, despite all the temporary chafings, life for them was unthinkable without the other. The relationship between Kate and Spence was like the relationship between John Wayne and John Ford. With the world at large, Duke Wayne set the agenda; with Ford, he listened to what Ford wanted, then said, “Yes, sir.”

Kate was used to getting her way, either through demands or subtler persuasion. But if Spence thought she was talking absolute balls, he’d snap, “Shut up, Kate,” and she’d shut up. I was always amazed by her deference, because I knew damn well that as far as Kate Hepburn was concerned, deference was just a word in a dictionary, and not one whose meaning she had much interest in learning. Spence was her romantic ideal, but he also had the aura of a father figure to her, someone for whom she had immense respect.

I think the basis of that respect was his unassuming ability as a professional. She thought, as so many of us did, that he was one of the very few great actors in the movie business. She would grumble that George Cukor always gave her notes on her performances, but he hardly ever gave Spence any serious direction. He didn’t need to; when Cukor looked at the rushes, everything he wanted to see in Tracy’s performance was already there.

It wasn’t just that you never caught Spence acting; it’s that his acting doesn’t date. Acting has styles, just as fashion does; what seems revelatory at the time can seem awfully mannered only a few decades later. But a Tracy performance is as consonant with 2016 as it was with 1945, and there are very few actors of whom that can be said. Only one, actually.

Theirs was an utterly adorable relationship, because the dynamic was completely that of an old married couple, even though they never married. They had that easy back-and-forth rhythm that old married couples have, as well as a sense of genuinely liking each other. The sexual attraction had been joined by a deep friendship, which is the best kind of romantic combination because it will sustain a relationship even if the sex burns out.

They worked well together because they balanced each other. Spence could be solitary and grumpy, and prefer to be left alone. Kate was always a woman who said yes to the next thing, especially if it was something she had never done before. Yes to a movie if it seemed interesting; yes to a Broadway musical, if for no other reason than she had never done a Broadway musical; yes to speaking for the left-wing presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948.

Yes to all that life has to offer.

This was the most valuable thing Kate gave me: She was always outward bound—an object lesson in how to live your life.

 • • • 

I worked with Joan Blondell on both It Takes a Thief and Switch, and her demeanor was very much that of a working actress, a total pro, without any airs. But to me she was show-business royalty—I was thrilled to meet her, let alone act with her.

She came to the movies in 1930, just about eighteen months after it became clear that sound wasn’t a fad after all. She had been in a Broadway play with Jimmy Cagney called Penny Arcade, and she and Cagney did a screen test for Warner Bros. and headed west immediately thereafter.

Jimmy Cagney told me later about his and Joan’s screen test—they knew the scene, because it was from Penny Arcade, and they knew each other well because they’d worked together for months at that point. The test crackled with energy and authenticity. Al Jolson had bought the movie rights to the play, and he turned around and sold it to Warners, where he was regarded as practically family because of The Jazz Singer and what came after. Of course, when Jolson’s box office began to fall off in the early 1930s, he became just another employee, albeit a rich one. With Jack Warner, relationships had a way of being temporary.

Anyway, Jim and Joan were off to Warner Bros. almost immediately on a one-picture contract. Their first movie turned out to be an adaptation of Penny Arcade under what Jack Warner believed to be the more commercial title of Sinners’ Holiday. Joan told me that Jack Warner signed her and Cagney to long-term contracts the day after they started shooting the picture—the rushes were that good.

Joan had been born in a trunk—literally. Her parents were vaudeville troupers, and she told me she spent most of her childhood working in the family act while traveling around America, Europe, China, and Australia. The Blondells played both the Pantages and Orpheum circuits, so you would have to rank them as successful, although Joan never claimed that they played the Palace—the vaudeville equivalent of a command performance before the Royal Family. Suffice it to say that there was no aspect of the business she wouldn’t eventually experience and, more important, understand.

Joan had some formal education, but not much; it was snatched a week or a month at a time when the family was on tour, or during brief downtimes. Like a lot of the women in this book, that nominal schooling didn’t stop her from being very well read. Toward the end of her life, she even wrote a novel called Center Door Fancy, which was more or less about her childhood in vaudeville, and it’s something she should justifiably have been proud of—it’s a good book. Joan was savvy, with huge street smarts.

The question arises as to whether the lack of formal education was a deterrent for some of these women, not so much in their careers—they could hire accountants to handle their money, and agents to help make career decisions—but in life. I feel qualified to offer an opinion about this because I only graduated from high school myself, after which I immediately began my assault on the fortress of show business.

Joan Blondell

Honestly, I don’t think it matters. In show business you are exposed to people, places, and situations that you could never dream of encountering in college, and in fact never would encounter in a conventional career. Some of those people and places and situations are good, and some are far from good, but show business has always seemed to me to be the equivalent not just of college, but of an exhaustively demanding graduate school.

Speaking for myself, I believe that I got far more out of 20th Century Fox than I ever would have gotten out of USC. What really matters is the desire to learn. If that’s present, and you have some personal initiative, you’ll do just fine in show business and, I suspect, in life.

Joan was one of those actresses whose essential nature came through the lens. She quickly became very popular in movies like Public Enemy (Cagney again), Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade (Cagney again). She typically played a streetwise sweetheart of a girl, almost always working class, a waitress or a chorus girl who was maybe a little brassy, but with a big heart. Audiences liked her, and Jack Warner liked her, too—Joan worked in as many as ten pictures a year.

Being employed by Warners was like finding yourself in the middle of a large, contentious family operation whose members had a tendency toward loud squabbling. I remember her once telling me that because they routinely worked very long days—to get a picture finished on schedule could mean an eighteen- or twenty-hour shift on the last day or two of a shoot—the relationships on set became like being with your parents and uncles and aunts. The flow of work was so long and the Warners stock company so unchanging that sometimes they wouldn’t even say hello or good-bye in the morning or at night. The crews became family, and some of the actors did, too.

If you asked her about those great Warners musicals, she’d respond by talking about how much effort they involved—much more than the straight comedies or dramas. There were no unions in the early 1930s, which meant that you’d have to be at the studio by six in the morning to go into makeup, and you might not break for lunch until three in the afternoon, which meant that you wouldn’t get out of there until midnight or close to it.

“You’d be ready to collapse,” Joan recalled.

On Saturday, you’d work all night, sometimes till the sun came up on Sunday. Even though everybody was young, it was still exhausting. And of course, such rampant abuse just hastened the arrival of unions in a couple of years.

“Time off?” she told me. “We didn’t have time off. Jack got his money’s worth. If you weren’t acting, you were rehearsing a number, or you were doing a photo layout. When I got pregnant, they kept me working until I was seven months pregnant. They’d put a chair or a desk in front of me to block out my stomach. That was just the way it was.

“I made quite a few pictures that I never even saw because I was too busy working. And decades later I’d see one on TV and I honestly wouldn’t remember making it, even though the evidence was right there in front of me.”

I have no doubt Joan was telling the truth. She would laugh when I asked her about the nightlife, because how could you possibly work those hours and go out at night? By the time Busby Berkeley was through shooting a musical number, the nightclubs were about to close!

The primary difference between Joan as a performer and Joan as a woman was that she was actually very domestic, and preferred being at home to being out in public. She was devoted to acting, but when she wasn’t performing, the last thing she wanted to do was go out on the town or pose for publicity photos. She would explain that when she was in vaudeville, the itinerant nature of her family’s profession meant that there was no such thing as a home life. The reason she played shopgirls or waitresses so well is that the vaudeville life was the show-business equivalent: You made a living, but it was a precarious one. Because Joan had traveled incessantly for the first twenty years or so of her life, as an adult she valued the nest as much as any woman I’ve ever known.

Her big dramatic break was probably Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which came after she left Warners, in which she gives a beautiful performance as Aunt Sissy. (It’s a very good movie; if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor.) Joan also did great character work in the classic noir Nightmare Alley, opposite Tyrone Power. In my experience, Aunt Sissy was Joan to a T, except Joan was more maternal than brassy; in the vernacular of the 1930s, she was a great broad.

I had seen many of Joan’s movies, loved them and her, and she didn’t disappoint me when we worked together. On the set, she was a very accomplished actress, with a terrific, humorous style that was all her own. She was fun and vivacious, and would often share little flashes, moments that stood out from the blur of making so many movies and making them so quickly. She once told me about working in Public Enemy, the movie that made Cagney a huge star. Jean Harlow also appeared in the picture in a scene or two, and everyone was very impressed because she was on loan from MGM, and people from MGM barely deigned to speak to people at Warners, let alone work with them.

Anyway, Harlow never wore a bra, and one day she bounced past Cagney, who gave her his wolfish grin and asked, “How do you hold those things up?”

“I ice ’em,” she said.

Over the years, Joan was married to some very interesting guys: George Barnes—an excellent cameraman who worked with everybody from Valentino to DeMille. Barnes was followed by Dick Powell, then Mike Todd.

She may have been bruised by the marriages, and I know she was damaged by Todd, who gambled away a lot of her money. She didn’t marry again after she and Todd split in 1950, although she was always a very attractive woman. But I don’t think there was any bitterness in Joan—it wasn’t in her character.

Dick Powell directed a movie I was in called The Hunters, so he naturally came up in my conversations with Joan. She said he was a nice guy—very true—but cheap about everything, up to and including lightbulbs and toilet paper. It got to her, and she decided to check out from the marriage in 1945. She spoke of him with humorous exasperation, not anger.

By the time I came to know her, Joan was very easy about her career and where she had arrived professionally. That was unusual, because it can be difficult for an actress who has been a big star to gradually settle for character parts. Sylvia Sidney, who was almost an exact contemporary of Joan’s, was well known as an irascible pain in the ass both on and off the set in her later years, which is probably one reason why she didn’t work a lot.

But Joan loved the atmosphere of a set, loved actors, loved the process of acting, and considered herself lucky to be in show business, which is probably why she continued working right up to her death.

Long after actresses who had been even bigger stars than she were relegated to menial parts in some pretty grim movies, you could see Joan in quality films like The Cincinnati Kid, with her old Warners’ pal Edward G. Robinson, or on TV in Here Come the Brides, an adaptation of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

The year before she died she did a movie for John Cassavetes called Opening Night, and even though Cassavetes’s world was far removed from Joan’s, she acquitted herself nobly.

Joan got nominated for an Oscar, as well as several Emmys, but never won. No matter. I honor her in my memory, and she continues to flourish for all those who see her in reruns of her great movies. She was a doll, and a very underrated performer.

 • • • 

Claire Trevor became a star a few years after Joan and a dear friend of mine long before she appeared in The Mountain opposite Spencer Tracy and me. She was later welcomed as a member of our inner circle when she played Natalie’s mother in Marjorie Morningstar.

I had gone to school with the children of Milton Bren, who was Claire’s third husband. Milton had custody of his sons from his first marriage, and he and Claire raised them together. Claire became part of my adolescence through her stepsons.

She was another of the actresses who had to go to work as a child. She was a Brooklyn girl, born in Bensonhurst, and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She began making shorts for Warner Bros. at their studio in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and then went to Hollywood.

Claire was warm about almost everything, funny about almost everything. She was particularly merciless about her own pretensions as a young actress, when, she said, she would much rather go to a party than study her part. “I really didn’t work very hard,” she admitted.

She got parts in some Broadway shows, but it didn’t wise her up. She could be hilarious about her lack of foresight. “I got offers from three different studios,” she said, “and I turned them all down. The movies were beneath me. Can you imagine being that stupid?”

Then things went cold in New York, and Claire had a very bad period that lasted about six months. No work, no money, no nothing. At that point Fox came back and again offered her a contract, and this time she jumped at it.

The first picture that earned her any notice was Dead End, on loan to Sam Goldwyn and William Wyler. She played a hard-up hooker and got an Oscar nomination. You would think that kind of notice would have changed things for her, but she went back to Fox and B pictures, where she was typically cast as a newspaperwoman or a girl detective—playing parts that had previously been given to Glenda Farrell.

But Dead End might have been the movie that got her Stagecoach for John Ford—again in the role of a prostitute, but one with a sweetness and good heart beneath her tough shell. It was a great performance for a great director, and to the end of her life she would say that it was the best movie she ever made. “The script was excellent,” she told me, “the director was the best in the business, the score was good, the camerawork was superb, and the cast couldn’t have been improved. Everything jelled, everybody jelled.

Claire Trevor

“It hardly ever happens that way—you always have to make allowances for something in almost every movie. The script isn’t quite good enough, or there’s an actor who isn’t quite right, or something. But Stagecoach was one of those rare pictures where everybody was at the top of their game. The pieces all fit.”

Claire tried to avoid watching her own movies—she rarely liked her own performance and usually found something lacking in the film itself. But when she watched Stagecoach, she fell into the movie just like a member of the audience; she almost forgot she was in it.

She was particularly disappointed with The High and the Mighty, because some flashbacks she appeared in were cut—the movie was running long, and something had to go. She felt that losing those scenes meant that her character didn’t make much sense, because the audience never saw what had happened to her before she got on the endangered plane that is the center of the film’s plot. (All actors have stories about a movie that could have been much better, at least regarding their character or their performance. I think it relates to their basic lack of control in the movie business.)

The same thing happened when she made Honky Tonk at MGM, when a couple of her scenes with Clark Gable were cut because the studio wanted to throw the weight of the movie behind Lana Turner. Lana was under contract to MGM, whereas Claire was freelancing, so the studio had no investment in her success. She would talk about how distraught she got over that—she really believed it would damage her career.

She needn’t have worried; she would later receive an Academy Award for her turn as the alcoholic mistress of Eddie Robinson’s thug in Key Largo, and she worked into the 1980s.

What Claire really wanted were those juicy melodramas that Bette Davis did at Warners, but those didn’t come her way. She felt she usually had to try to breathe life into parts that basically didn’t have much depth. “I’d never met anyone like the women I usually played,” she told me. “I had to imagine what they’d be like.”

But imagination was one of Claire’s strong points as an actress. If the script didn’t offer her any help, she’d construct an imaginary biography for the role she was playing—where she was born, how her parents raised her—and then she would project herself into that person with that background and those experiences. That helped her give a sense of someone with a deeper character than the scriptwriter had provided.

Milton Bren’s primary business was real estate development, and he became extremely wealthy. He owned The Pursuit, a beautiful racing sailboat that won all sorts of races and that he docked at Newport Beach. Milton and Claire and Natalie and I would regularly go to Catalina on Milton’s boat. He was a great sailor and became a good producer.

Claire had a sense of inquisitiveness, and of wonder. To her dying day, she was interested in every aspect of life. She always had her painting—she did a portrait of Natalie and me that my daughter Katie now has—her travel, her reading, her friends. Claire was a man’s woman. Duke Wayne was crazy about her and valued her highly, and she was also close to Bogart.

Like everyone else, Claire had her ration of grief; Milton died in 1979, just about the same time Duke Wayne did. But the great tragedy came before that: the loss of her son, Charles, who was killed in an airplane crash. It was a terrible blow, but Claire decided that she could sit around and be depressed or get out and enjoy the rest of her life. She bought an apartment at the Pierre in New York and attended every Broadway and museum opening with her close friend Arlene Francis.

I saw Claire for the last time just before she died, and she was still clearheaded, still a woman of absolute honesty and warmth—a straight-up woman, the very best kind.

When she died, Claire left $5,000 each to several dozen friends. I was one of them; her will said to “consider this a hug and a kiss.” Whenever I’m in Paris, I still go to the caviar bar she took me to. Then I drink a toast to Claire’s memory and do it all over again. It’s been on my tab for a long time, but I will always be in debt to this extraordinary actress, this woman who helped teach me how to live an affirmative life.

Looking back, I can see that Claire became a valued mentor for me because of my admiration for her talent as an actress and her warmth as a human being. She was an Earth Mother: bountiful, loving, always supportive. Show business gave her the leverage and the wherewithal to educate herself, and she and Barbara Stanwyck both stressed the importance of using it as a vehicle to build a life outside of the movie business.

I miss her every day.

 • • • 

Jack Warner wouldn’t have had a clue about how to showcase Greer Garson or Greta Garbo. Because he was a rough-and-tumble mug himself, he filled his studio with people of a similar persuasion—Cagney, Davis, Flynn, George Raft, Eddie Robinson, people who loved to treat Jack with the complete lack of respect he craved.

Over at 20th Century Fox, Darryl Zanuck made a great deal of money off Betty Grable, but left to his own devices, he preferred sexy brunettes: Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell, Jean Peters.

As for Paramount, they managed to luck out for years by what amounted to a lack of definition. If you can discern any pattern at all in Paramount’s leading ladies, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.

For a long time, Marlene Dietrich was the studio’s signature actress. She was hired as a Garbo competitor and proved to be more adaptable and far hardier in the bargain; for one thing, she had a more approachable brand of sexuality; for another, she had genuine humor.

Paramount’s major discovery in the last half of the 1930s was Dorothy Lamour; their big star during World War II besides Betty Hutton was Veronica Lake, who didn’t last long, for reasons that had little to do with talent. Lake was very difficult, had problems with alcohol, and was given to anti-Semitic outbursts. Otherwise, she was a sweetheart.

RKO and Columbia, the studios that stood near the bottom of the list of majors, were rarely able to gather enough top talent to have a particular style or approach to actresses. RKO had Ginger Rogers for a number of years, and they did very well for each other, while Columbia had Jean Arthur, and ditto. But there was never a sense of actorly identity at those studios, largely, I believe, because neither was run by people with a bent for long-term thinking, which was quite the reverse at MGM and Warners, which consciously built their operations to last.

Ginger started out as a gum-cracking chorus girl, but revealed her inner swan when she was paired with Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio. They made nine more movies together. Forests have been felled trying to explain their particular chemistry. Simply put, they looked—and danced—as if they belonged together, as if they hadn’t been matched up by a movie studio, but by God. When Astaire and Rogers were in motion, they had the easy camaraderie of a couple that had met in grade school and had had an understanding ever since.

That amity didn’t always extend to their relationship offscreen. Fred and Ginger dated briefly in New York before the movies called, but there hadn’t been anything in particular between them. In later years Fred could be a little grumpy about Ginger, and he wasn’t crazy about her mother, who was omnipresent. He was very funny about Ginger’s penchant for scene-stealing costumes. He felt such gestures were self-defeating and rather silly, because they took attention away from the dancer’s body, which was, after all, the point.

But he never said a word against her work ethic or her skills as a dancer. Nor could he, because the basis for their shared magic was their dancing. One critic noted that they seldom kiss in their movies, but they don’t have to—their sex life takes place when they dance, and those scenes are among the most rapturously convincing love scenes ever filmed.

That Fred and Ginger respected each other as professionals more than they loved each other as man and woman is a testament to the strange alchemy of performance. People talk about the magic of the movies, but there’s also a mystery to them, and it’s personified by Astaire and Rogers.

 • • • 

As the 1930s were ending, Fox was unleashing a new queen of the studio: Betty Grable. She was born in St. Louis but came to Hollywood at an early age, where she graduated from the Hollywood Professional School. After that, Betty went to work in the chorus. You can see her as the third girl on the left in Goldwyn musicals with Eddie Cantor, such as Palmy Days.

A few years later, she was getting leads in RKO B movies, and then Darryl Zanuck brought her to Fox as a means of keeping Alice Faye in line. (Alice and Darryl heartily disliked each other, but then Alice wasn’t all that crazy about show business in the first place.) I seriously doubt that Darryl had any idea that Betty would become as huge a star as she did.

When Alice had to have some minor surgery, rather than wait a month to start a picture called Down Argentine Way, Darryl simply substituted Betty as the star. The picture turned out to be a huge hit. Most Fox musicals were, but they were never as ambitious as the musicals Arthur Freed made at MGM. That just might have been the reason the Fox vehicles were so reliable—with the exception of the Mickey and Judy shows, MGM musicals were rarely the same, while the Fox musicals were heavily patterned. If you liked one, you’d like them all. Even the titles had a geographically similar bent: Down Argentine Way, Tin Pan Alley, Moon Over Miami, Springtime in the Rockies, and so on.

Two things worked in Betty’s favor: Technicolor and World War II. The former showcased her luscious peaches-and-cream complexion, and the latter made Betty into the pinup of pinups. Besides that, her sunny personality was a perfect respite for wartime audiences. Harry Brand, the head of publicity at Fox, insured Betty’s legs for a million dollars, or at least he said he did, and by the end of the war not only was she Fox’s highest-paid star, she was the movie industry’s, as well.

Betty’s films were undemanding and made great amounts of money for the studio. Darryl’s only complaint about her was her habit of closing down production for a day to take in a particularly hot horse race. Nobody but a hugely successful movie star could have done such a thing, but Darryl put up with it. I suspect he was actually a little embarrassed by her pictures, as he went out of his way to produce a given number of projects each year that might be termed the anti-Grable movies—startlingly downbeat efforts like The Ox-Bow Incident or Gentleman’s Agreement. He even tried to broaden Betty’s own appeal by casting her in a noir drama called I Wake Up Screaming, but she seemed uncomfortable with it, and so did the audience—our Betty, menaced by a killer? The only thing that could threaten Betty Grable was falling off her platform shoes.

After World War II, Darryl seemed to sense that Betty’s heyday might be passing, so he upgraded her collaborators; he got her a posthumous Gershwin score for The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, and he hired Preston Sturges to write and direct a film for her called The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, a Western parody that died the death, and deserved to.

But audiences continued to love her, and justifiably so—she ranked in the top ten box office stars for ten consecutive years, from 1941 to 1951, something no other female star has ever accomplished. (Doris Day placed ten years on the list, but not consecutively.)

As I found out when I got to know Betty, she was a totally sincere and kind person who refused the easy alternative of an ironic view of the world. She was beloved around the studio; the crews adored her because she was one of them—an unpretentious girl who never forgot her days in the chorus. Betty worked hard and liked to have a good time, and people responded in kind.

Even comedians liked Betty. Take Lucille Ball. Comedy was Lucy’s profession, not her personality. Lucy wasn’t particularly funny offstage, but she appreciated people who were, and she always said that if she needed to laugh she simply spent some time with Betty Grable.

Betty Grable

Betty’s film career ended early; she made her last movie in 1955, when she was only thirty-nine—young by modern standards, but Betty was a song-and-dance girl, and the feathers-and-sequins vehicles that were her specialty were heading toward the exit in favor of lavish versions of big Broadway musicals. She was up for the part of Miss Adelaide in the movie version of Guys and Dolls, but lost out to Vivian Blaine, who had done it on stage. A hit like that would have propped up Betty for a few years, at least, and given her a second wind. Instead, she kept her hand in doing nightclubs and theater, and she never stopped following the horses.

Her end was unhappy. Her husband, Harry James, was a degenerate gambler and spent most of her money, and then she got cancer. I remember visiting her in the hospital not long before the end; she was very ill, but she still had that bright spirit that endeared her to millions of people all over the world. She wanted her friends as well as her audiences to have a good time. As I sat there with her, I was so moved—she was trying to get me to laugh, trying to make me feel comfortable. This darling woman was only fifty-seven when she died.

“I can sing a little, dance a little, and act a little,” she said. “I was just lucky, I guess.” Actually, those of us who flocked to Betty’s musicals in glorious Technicolor were the lucky ones. And we knew it.

 • • • 

Betty Grable’s losing a star role in Guys and Dolls is the sort of thing that’s part of the business—the factors that determine a career are often just a matter of good breaks and bad breaks.

For instance: Ann Sheridan. Warner Bros. publicity department dubbed her “the Oomph Girl,” and yes, she was sexy and all that. But she also had a very real quality on-screen, that of a good-hearted dame, which was her real personality coming through. Ann Sheridan played characters who could dish it out as well as take it. They weren’t exactly tough but could be if you pushed them too far.

Ann was born Clara Lou Sheridan in Nowheresville, Texas, but she won a beauty contest and made it to Hollywood by the time she was eighteen. She was beautiful, but needed something to break her out of the pack of the ten thousand other girls who were beautiful, too.

Ann told me that it was a Warners’ publicist named Bob Taplinger who had George Hurrell take some photos of her that reeked of sex. He posed her in a silk robe that was provocatively sliding off her shoulder and with rumpled hair, as if she’d just gotten out of a very active bed. There was nothing overt in the image, but the lighting and the look in her eyes told you everything you needed to know.

Those photographs changed everything for Annie. Before that, she’d been just one of the girls playing throwaway parts, but now she started getting real roles in real movies (Angels with Dirty Faces, City for Conquest, Kings Row). Despite this, the studio’s attitude toward her never changed; Warners was a Darwinian environment where only the strong and the loud survived. Ironically, Ann was never cast as the sexpot the Hurrell stills implied.

“I had to fight for everything at Warners,” Ann once told me. “Everybody had to fight. Cagney, Davis, Flynn, everybody. A knock-down, drag-out fight.” Ann spent a lot of years at the studio at a time when it was very difficult to be a female star there.

Bette Davis was in uncontested first position, and then came Joan Crawford. Olivia de Havilland was there for years as well, which left actresses like Ida Lupino and Ann struggling simply because the premiere scripts were always going to be earmarked for the biggest stars.

Ann Sheridan

In 1947, Ann left Warners, and it looked like things were going to be fine. She signed for Good Sam opposite Gary Cooper and director Leo McCarey, and that was followed by I Was a Male War Bride with Cary Grant and Howard Hawks. Marion Marshall, who would become my second wife and the mother of my daughter Kate, was in the latter picture, and had nothing but good things to say about Ann. But Good Sam was a flop, and I Was a Male War Bride did nothing for her because all anybody talked about was Cary Grant in drag, an image that was so hilarious and overwhelming that no one even noticed that Ann was in the picture.

After that, she couldn’t command A-list projects and went from studio to studio, appearing in films of gradually diminishing importance and budget. And there was another factor: Annie was a hard-drinking, hard-living woman, and the effects of the scotch began to show on her face when she was still young. She was doing a TV series when she died of cancer in 1967 at the age of fifty-two. What a loss—a great lady.

Throughout all this, Ann was a well-liked woman. But she couldn’t catch a break when she needed one—she never nabbed the Margo Channing part that would make people sit up and take notice, or even a TV series that would lead to a reassessment of her career. Look at what I Love Lucy did for Lucille Ball after a midrange movie career that came to a screeching halt when MGM tried to make her a glamour-puss when she was really a clown.

Ann needed some luck, but didn’t get any.

 • • • 

There were any number of other actresses whose careers were not as successful as they should have been. On some level, their expectations weren’t met, and many of them closed down a little—or a lot. Acting became the equivalent of a love affair that ended badly—a source of disgruntlement and dissatisfaction.

I didn’t know Lauren Bacall terribly well. Spencer Tracy took me to Bogart’s house once before Bogie died, and a year or so after Bogie’s death Bacall was heavily involved with Frank Sinatra, who was close to Natalie and me. Frank lavished Betty with all of his immense charm and generosity. After nursing Bogie through a dismal cancer that took more than a year to kill him, Betty was in desperate need of positive reinforcement, and Frank supplied all that and more.

Frank had been a good friend of Bogie’s, and had really admired him. Somehow or other, Betty assumed that they were going to get married, and the story leaked out. Frank thought the information came from Betty, and he cut her off, which rocked her.

A few years later, Betty married Jason Robards Jr., who resembled Bogie and was like him in another way—Jason was his own man and didn’t care overmuch what anybody else thought of him. He also drank even more than Bogie, and that’s saying something. The marriage turned into a nonstop battle fueled by Jason’s drinking. (He later dried out.)

I used to go surf fishing with Jason. He was a hell of an actor, devoted to his profession, and a good guy . . . when he was sober. The contentious atmosphere bred by drinking attracts me not at all; I don’t want to be around it, let alone in it, so I grew slightly apart from Betty when she was married to Jason.

After they divorced, she never remarried, although there were a few long-term relationships. She had a couple of successful Broadway shows and wrote a good memoir, although her movie career remained a sometime thing. In later years, whenever I saw her, there was a sharpness to her, an undertone of bitterness. I don’t know if it was her inability to find an equivalently happy relationship with anybody else after Bogie died, professional frustration, or both.

But in the years when we saw each other regularly, I liked Betty a lot. She stood firm, she let you know what she thought, and you ignored her at your peril.

 • • • 

I think it’s important to note here how isolated actresses were at this point in the 1940s. As I mentioned, at this time there was precisely one woman director in the business: Dorothy Arzner, and she didn’t have a lengthy career—only fifteen years or so. All the studio heads were men, and, with the exception of my friend Minna Wallis, the vast majority of the agents were men as well.

There were precisely three women producers: Harriet Parsons at RKO, Joan Harrison at Universal, and Virginia Van Upp at Columbia.

Harriet was the daughter of Louella Parsons, so everybody figured her position was a patronage job, although if you look at her credits, it’s clearly an unfair charge. Joan Harrison had worked with Alfred Hitchcock for years, cowriting the script for Rebecca and some other pictures, and was certainly a talent. Years later, Hitchcock would hire her to oversee his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which she ran like a Swiss watch for ten years. After that, she married the novelist Eric Ambler and retired to England. As for Virginia Van Upp, she was Harry Cohn’s right-hand woman and produced Gilda, among other movies.

Add to that reality the fact that most women’s starring careers were quite short. Men could go on playing leads until decrepitude, but for actresses, turning forty was typically a death knell for leading parts. It had been that way since the silent days for reasons both technical—the early film stock tended toward the harsh and was merciless on even minor signs of aging—and cultural.

It seems to me that women were also regarded in a more overtly sexual way than men were. Bogart, Cagney, and Wayne were never typical romantic leading men, so they could age. Nobody thought anything of it unless their screen pairings verged on the absurd, such as Bogart and Gary Cooper both taking a run at a dewy Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon. Bogie and Coop may have only been old enough to be her father, but they looked old enough to be her grandfather.

Women had a much narrower window of opportunity. Actresses as varied as Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, and Norma Shearer all saw their careers decline either just before they hit forty or just after. Cases such as Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis, who sailed on into middle age and beyond, have always been the exceptions.

Actresses with any degree of self-awareness know the clock is ticking, and it lights the fire of urgency in many of them to get as much work as they can as soon as they can, if only because nothing’s as cold as the movie business when you’re considered passé.

Women also faced financial hurdles. Jimmy Stewart got a percentage of the profits as early as 1950; a woman wasn’t granted that until Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatra, more than ten years later. Men were in control, and women had to fight just to stay even. A woman like Barbara Stanwyck was strong, and had to be; otherwise, she would never have been able to flourish for as long as she did.

In order to gain leverage within the industry in which they worked, actresses dealt with the situation in different ways. Some, like Irene Dunne or Claudette Colbert, would be ladylike but very firm—Colbert’s shooting day ended at 5 P.M. and not a minute later. Joan Crawford would often sleep with her director. Bette Davis could be a holy terror, and since most men try to avoid angry women, they would give her de facto control as a means of placating her. John Huston stated the truth: “The studio was afraid of her.”

What made Bette mad? Mainly, deceiving her or lying to her. But on a deeper level, almost everything, up to and including the fact of being under contract to a studio. As Bette once told me, “I could be forced to do anything the studio told me to do. They could ask a contract player to appear in a burlesque house. The only recourse was to refuse, and then you were suspended without pay. When you were under suspension, without salary, you couldn’t work in a Woolworth’s. You could only starve.”

Actually, she omitted one detail: The length of time you were suspended was added to the back end of your contract.

In essence, being under contract meant that the studio owned you and could do as it wished with you. From the studio’s point of view, the appropriate response of its employees should have been “Be grateful and shut up.” They had taken nobodies and made them into somebodies, and those nobodies had been exposed to no financial risk whatsoever in the process. But from Bette’s point of view, the terms of the deal amounted to servitude, and the very fact of it was an abiding irritant.

Not everybody felt as vehemently as she did; for some, who were born in a small town or had spent years struggling in vaudeville or the theater, signing a contract with a studio felt like a perfectly fair exchange in return for a great deal of money and job security.

Of course, such security was only temporary. When MGM was thinking of dumping Joan Crawford, they put her in something called The Ice Follies of 1939, which was one way to scrawl the handwriting on the wall. She recouped somewhat when they cast her in The Women, and A Woman’s Face is certainly a strong movie, but she was still gone from MGM by 1943.

The nature of the transaction was very clear. As Clark Gable characterized it, “I am paid not to think . . . and to be obedient.”

Some actresses fought back legally. Bette and Olivia de Havilland both dragged Jack Warner into court. Olivia worked for him from 1935 to 1943, and when her contract expired she decided to go out on her own. Then Warner informed her that she owed the studio another six months because of the time she had been on suspension for refusing parts. Olivia sued and Olivia won. The ruling that found in her favor improved conditions for actors and actresses alike.

After doing battle with carnivores like Jack Warner or Harry Cohn six days a week, how could you go home and quietly mix a drink for yourself and your husband? These guys were killers, and to work for them on a continuing basis you had to be as overbearing as they were just to stay even. But the dance was a difficult one to manage—if an actress wasn’t tough, she wouldn’t survive, but she couldn’t let too much of that toughness show on-screen, or it could be off-putting to the audience, not to mention to her leading man. People make jokes about Joan Crawford’s shoulder pads and a demeanor that got more imperious with each passing year, but you can see all that as the price of doing business.

I’ve mentioned something else that comes into play with careers, and that is luck. Breaks. When they land in front of you, you have to take advantage of them, but they have to land there first.

Bogart only got The Maltese Falcon because George Raft turned it down—he didn’t want to work with a first-time director, who happened to be John Huston. As a matter of fact, George Raft made several careers because of his insensitivity to good scripts—he also turned down Double Indemnity, so Fred MacMurray got to actor’s heaven.

So much of it is fortune; so much of it is breaks.

All of us bring ourselves to the screen; somehow or another the soul, the loving essence of a person, usually comes through the lens of the camera and resides in the film. I’ve mentioned how Bette Davis emphasized her character’s passion and irascibility in All About Eve. Bette was drawn to those aspects of the character—the jealousy, the blood on the show-business floor—because that’s the way she perceived her life and career: as a constant struggle.

When she was a young actress in New York, she was denied admission to the Civic Repertory Theatre by the great Eva Le Gallienne; when she got a job in a stock company in Rochester, she was fired by the director, a young George Cukor. Her first screen test, for Sam Goldwyn, was rejected. When she was finally signed for the movies, by Universal, Carl Laemmle famously said that she had about as much sex appeal as the gangly comic Slim Summerville, and she was quickly thrown overboard.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have talent, it was her looks and her inability to project the simpering adoration of the leading man that was expected of young leading ladies of that period. She simply was not a conventional ingénue by any means, and she never simpered. And then there was the larger fact that she had a tendency to want to do things her own way, theatrical courtesies be damned.

She was saved by George Arliss, speaking of unconventional-looking actors. Arliss looked a lot like a fish, and he appears remarkably hammy to modern eyes, but his thundering style earned a great deal of respect back in the day. When he hired Bette to make The Man Who Played God with him, and then went out of his way to praise her abilities, it got a lot of people’s attention and earned her a contract at Warner Bros.

The thing to remember about Bette was that all the rejection she endured only strengthened her desire to make it. Her attitude was never “Maybe they’re right . . .,” it was “I’ll show those ignorant bastards!”

She regarded Jack Warner as the primary ignorant bastard, simply because Jack was congenitally disinclined to believe anything an actor ever told him. It took him years to figure out what to do with Bette, but through sheer bloody-minded perseverance she gradually accrued the outlines of a screen character—a woman who would do as she pleased, consequences be damned.

By 1944, when I was going to the movies several times a week, Bette was a huge star, with movies like Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Letter, The Little Foxes, Mr. Skeffington, and Now, Voyager. A couple of them were great, but all of them were unforgettable, simply because of Bette’s strength and a personality so forceful you couldn’t take your eyes off her, even when she was playing a bedraggled caterpillar who was soon to become a beautiful butterfly in Now, Voyager.

Bette had a magnificent instrument, magnificent body behavior. She was a small woman, but she came into the movie frame with a rush, as if she owned the light and couldn’t wait for the arcs to warm her face. She took a scene and ran with it. That’s the way she saw the work, and that’s the way she saw life—as a battle to be won, and she was determined to vanquish anyone or anything that got in between her and what she believed to be the truth of a character or a script. And if there weren’t any obstacles, Bette was quite capable of creating them, just so she could sail into battle.

She wanted to dominate, which is why she married weak men. Her husbands were, in order, Harmon Nelson, Arthur Farnsworth, William Grant Sherry, and Gary Merrill. Well, Gary Merrill wasn’t actually weak, as he gave Bette as good as he got, but most of it was the booze talking, and that only inflamed the situation. You couldn’t win with Bette in a romantic relationship.

Bette Davis

Professionally or personally, she didn’t want to be told what to do. She bridled at William Wyler, who insisted in sculpting her performances in Jezebel, The Letter, and The Little Foxes. She was attracted to the idea of strength in a man—she and Wyler had a brief affair—but she would not, could not be subservient, not even to a director as great as Wyler, with whom, I believe, she did her best work. She could overwhelm a weak director and battle a strong one to the point of mutual exhaustion.

I first met Bette just about the time she was doing All About Eve through our mutual friend Claire Trevor. We were at Claire’s house in Newport Beach. Bette and I became good friends and stayed good friends for the rest of her life. I produced Madame Sin, a TV movie that Bette starred in, and got to witness her firsthand as a destructive force. She gave David Greene, the director, a very hard time, but he deserved it—he lied to her, and you could not lie to Bette.

What always surprised people about Bette was the extent of her domesticity. She took her work quite seriously, but that was also true of her private time. She loved to cook New England boiled dinners—lobster and such—and that alone set her off from almost all the actresses who were her contemporaries. It’s not that none of them could cook, it’s that they worked six days a week. On the seventh day, they needed to rest, and their homes were not staging areas for parties so much as they were a refuge, a retreat from the exhausting pressures of show business.

Bette would rent in places like Laguna, and they were always lovely houses—I particularly remember one she had in Coldwater Canyon. Whether she owned or rented, she had a housekeeper who traveled with her and kept her homes the way Bette wanted them kept.

In that era, actors were itinerant and grew used to living in hotels, so they didn’t really have much opportunity to develop a decorating taste of their own. When the serious money started rolling in, decorators became necessary; they could help stars find the proper style that would set them off. In the process of seeing what other women were doing with their houses, and in hiring and firing decorators, actresses could develop a taste of their own.

But even there Bette set her own course. She didn’t pay any attention to designers because she knew exactly what she wanted. She had a knack for decorating in a specific style—again, very New England. She would repurpose old wooden commodes for use as end tables. And once you got over the initial surprise—and hesitation—of seeing them, they looked marvelous, if eccentric, and functioned beautifully.

Similarly, Bette was also a good, attentive mother. The children of many stars were raised by nannies, simply because the parents had other priorities—their careers, mainly. But Bette would vacation with her kids, made them not just a part of her life, but a focus of it.

In 1961, she did the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, and pulled the play down around her head like Samson bringing down the temple. She didn’t act the part. Instead, she turned a perfectly good script into “The Bette Davis Show.” She wouldn’t take direction and she antagonized her leading man to the point that he tried to strangle her during a rehearsal.

When she made her entrance on opening night, she was greeted by an ovation, and she responded by breaking character, walking down to the edge of the stage, and clasping her hands over her head like a triumphant prizefighter. The crowd ate it up, but her behavior was completely disrespectful of the play and her fellow actors.

All this derived from fear. Her marriage to Gary Merrill had just broken up, she was drinking too much, her movie career was in the doldrums, and she was losing her looks. She was desperate for the love of the audience. Tennessee Williams was equally desperate for a hit, which was the only reason he didn’t fire her. And Bette did sell tickets, although what the audience saw wasn’t The Night of the Iguana, but something else entirely.

The reviews were pretty bad, and Bette blamed Tennessee, blamed the director, blamed everyone but herself. Classic self-sabotage.

Tennessee certainly had his problems, but The Night of the Iguana had good bones—strong characters clashing in interesting ways. Bette left after 128 performances, and the show struggled on for a while longer. The play was converted into a fine movie by John Huston. Because of the stellar cast, it’s probably a better film than it was a play, but it could still have provided Bette with a springboard. Instead, The Night of the Iguana was regarded as a flamboyant flop. Neurosis is usually a component of failure, but there are ways that neurosis can be converted into strength. When Bette was thirty, she knew that; when she was fifty-six, she had forgotten it.

For all of her volatility and the special handling she mandated, I always adored her. Her personal courage never flagged. She brought up a mentally disabled daughter, which was extraordinarily difficult emotionally. She did the best job she could raising her children, and I genuinely believe that the vile memoir her daughter B.D. wrote helped kill her—it was the kind of primal betrayal that destroys the will to live.

Bette spoke to me about the book. She wasn’t so much angry as broken by it. I had heard B.D. tell her that she was the greatest mother in the world, that only Bette would have stuck with her through thick and thin. And then to have the child you thought loved you betray you, not just privately but publicly . . .

At first Bette couldn’t believe it was happening; later she tried to avoid talking about it. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her; it was the worst thing that ever could have happened to her. She never got over it, and the people who loved Bette never got over it, either.

When Bette died in 1989, she was buried at Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, looking down on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, where she had worked for more than fourteen years. Robert Osborne and Kathy Sermak, Bette’s loyal assistant and surrogate daughter, planned the memorial service on Stage 18 at Warners, Bette’s favorite stage. She had made The Letter, Old Acquaintance, and Now, Voyager there, among others. She used to say that the reason she liked Warners as much as she did was because it was a “workers” studio. She would have gone crazy at MGM, with Norma Shearer and Greer Garson swanning around.

The atmosphere on Stage 18 was that of a film set. There were lights, there were cameras, there were film props, including the clock that had been on the set of Mr. Skeffington. Above the podium was a screen to project film clips. On either side of the screen, enormous photographs of Bette hung by thin wires strung from the rafters.

People who had loved and respected Bette were there: Clint Eastwood, George Hamilton, Vincent Price, Stefanie Powers, Glenn Ford, Diane Baker, Teresa Wright. Jill and I were there, of course, and the contingent from the Warner Bros. of Bette’s era included the screenwriter Julius Epstein, the director Vincent Sherman, the editor Rudi Fehr, and the actress Joan Leslie.

The hosts were David Hartman, James Woods, and Angela Lansbury. Jimmy Woods said that seeing Bette in Now, Voyager had inspired him to pursue an acting career, and that Bette wrote a poetry on the screen that was the equal of Yeats: “There are two kinds of people, those of us who write poetry and those of us who read it. Even those of us who couldn’t read poetry, read her work with some amount of genius, simply because of the beauty with which she’d written it.” After the remembrances and the film clips, Bette’s own version of “I Wish You Love” was played, and then I got up and turned on the work light, which is the signal on a film set that the day’s work is done and it’s time to go home.

As we filed out, each of us was given a white rose as a memento of one of the most remarkable human beings we had ever known.

Later, Kathy Sermak gave me a pewter ashtray with an oak handle that Bette had always carried with her while she smoked and prowled through her house. That battered ashtray and Bette’s friendship will always be two of my most prized possessions.

 • • • 

Bette brought passion to her work, but an actress like Rosalind Russell brought something else: joy. Roz had a most interesting career; she was never one of the hot, sexy young actresses of the moment. She was good-looking, but no more than that. What she had was an incandescent gift for comedy. (I wasn’t crazy about Roz in drama—like Norma Shearer, she tended to go for noble uplift, and that killed her natural ebullience.)

Roz was another New England girl, born in Connecticut to a lawyer and a fashion editor, who sent their daughter to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Because Roz grew up in a two-career house, she was very comfortable playing women who had no intention of devoting their lives to a man, or even conceding a point. But it took her a while to find her sea legs. She was making movies as early as 1934, and you can see the filmmakers trying to figure out what would work for this high-energy but not overwhelmingly beautiful girl.

She started to hit her stride in 1935, when she made China Seas opposite heavyweights Clark Gable and Jean Harlow and more than held her own. Her career hit fourth gear with comedies like The Women and Four’s a Crowd, and she alternated comedy with drama for the rest of her career.

To watch Roz in pictures like His Girl Friday and Auntie Mame is to see a woman who can do both near-slapstick and stylized high comedy. She had energy, and she had timing that was spot on. Cary Grant made everyone who worked with him look good, but Roz made Cary even better than he was ordinarily, because she gave him confidence—whatever he threw at her, she could return. If you stuck to the script, Roz could give the words a twist or lilt that made the lines seem better than they were; if you wanted to improvise, Roz could hit the ball back over the net with ease.

Yet Roz was wildly underrated in her time, largely, I think, because she was a talent in a time that was largely devoted to beauty. Even now, she’s not spoken of as one of the greats, although I think she was, and her best pictures are in constant rotation on Turner Classic Movies.

Rosalind Russell

I got to know Roz in the 1950s, when Natalie and I lived down the street from her. A few years later, Natalie worked with her in Gypsy. We both thought Roz was subtly miscast as Momma Rose, a part that Natalie and I felt cried out for Judy Garland. But Jack Warner refused even to consider hiring Judy because he felt she had personally driven the budget of A Star Is Born to outlandish heights—she simply refused to show up on time, day after day, week after week. That, and the fact that she and Sid Luft, her hustler/husband, had stolen furniture from the studio and used it to furnish their house.

Roz could Rex Harrison her way through a song, but by the time she came to make Gypsy, her voice had gotten very deep and throaty from age and cigarettes, narrowing what little range she had. A lot of her songs had to be dubbed, and rather obviously so.

As a woman, Roz was very tasteful and quite religious, although not relentlessly pious in the way that Loretta Young was. Mostly, Roz was perpetually involved—she always had a project or six. Like Claire Trevor, she had an innately positive outlook on life.

When Roz threw a dinner party, everything was impeccable. The food and wine, of course, but also the guest list. Cary Grant would be there, especially when he was married to Barbara Hutton, with whom Roz was very close. Barbara once gave Roz a stunning piece of jewelry, a gorgeous bracelet that was white gold and baguettes. But when Roz named her newborn son Lance, Barbara saw red, because she had also named her son Lance—a name she had gotten out of a Victorian novel.

Barbara felt that Roz had violated some sort of personal copyright she held on the name Lance and stopped speaking to her old friend. The extremely close friendship was over. Small-world department: Years later, Barbara’s son, Lance, married Jill St. John. Barbara adored him all his life, until his tragic death in a plane crash.

(Speaking of jewelry, the owner of what might have been the finest jewelry collection in Hollywood was Sonja Henie, although there are those who think Paulette Goddard’s was even better, and I often heard Merle Oberon’s name mentioned in that regard, as well. Why Paulette and Sonja Henie? I think it might be because they were more involved with the gifts they received from their lovers and husbands than they were with their lovers and husbands. Jewelry mattered to them—it was a way of keeping score. After Henie’s movie career was over, she fronted an ice show that was quite lucrative, and she remained attentive to the kind of men who were, shall we say, generous by nature.)

Everyone liked Roz. Nobody liked her husband, Freddie Brisson, who was known to everybody in Hollywood as “The Lizard of Roz.” Freddie was universally disliked because—how to put this delicately?—because he was an arrogant asshole.

Nobody could ever figure out from where Freddie’s arrogance derived, because he really hadn’t accomplished much. He was the son of Carl Brisson, an actor who had starred in one of Hitchcock’s early movies, The Ring, in 1927. Freddie produced some of Roz’s pictures and some of Roz’s plays, but like a lot of Hollywood mates he was basically a satellite that orbited the star’s planet. But that reflected glory was enough to give Freddie a head the size of Jupiter.

Everyone put up with Freddie because, well, Roz was Roz.

And they did have a great backstory: Freddie was Danish and had sailed to America in late 1939. The trip across the Atlantic took about twelve days, because the ship had to keep zigzagging to avoid German U-boats. The passengers on the boat only had two movies to keep them amused. One of them was The Women, which featured Roz. Freddie fell in love with her through the movie.

When he got to New York, he sent a telegram to Cary Grant, who was a friend from his days in England. Cary responded by inviting Freddie to Hollywood and told him that he would be happy to introduce Freddie to Miss Russell, with whom he just happened to be costarring in His Girl Friday.

Freddie got to Hollywood, and went to Chasen’s at a prearranged time. Cary showed up with Roz, but she didn’t understand what was happening—she thought she was on a date with Cary. Freddie persisted and got her phone number anyway, then pursued her for weeks before it finally dawned on her that Cary wasn’t interested, but that Freddie was.

When they got married in 1941, Cary was best man, and when Roz died in 1976, Cary was a pallbearer.

True story.

By this point you might be noticing the emergence of a theme here—strong women marrying weak or inappropriate men. There were dozens of examples of this in the Hollywood I grew up in, and I’m sure there are dozens more in modern Hollywood. Sometimes you can figure out what impels a woman to choose one man over another; other times it’s a complete mystery.

Laraine Day had a solid career in the late 1930s and 1940s, starting out in the Dr. Kildare series at MGM and graduating to name-above-the-title status in movies like Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, The Locket, and Mr. Lucky with Cary Grant. Laraine was regarded as a very pleasant woman, so everybody was stunned when she married Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, and the man who voiced the phrase “Nice guys finish last.”

I knew Leo quite well—too well. Leo loved the nightlife, loved to gamble, and he loved women, whether he was married to them or not. The strange thing about their marriage was that Laraine was a Mormon, and if you were going to choose a group of characteristics least likely to appeal to a Mormon, every one of them would have been embodied by Leo.

One day Leo asked me to lend him $10,000. I didn’t ask him what it was for, but I imagine it was for a gambling debt he didn’t want Laraine to know about. I gave him the money.

Six months later, I was still waiting for my money. A few months after that I went to Frank Sinatra, who had a lot more experience in loaning large amounts than I did.

I told Frank my tale of woe and was met with a shrug. “When you hand a man that kind of money,” Frank told me, “be prepared to kiss it good-bye. That’s the way it is.”

I appreciated his point, but $10,000 meant a lot more to me than it did to Frank. I had to put quite a lot of pressure on Leo, and for quite a long time, but he did eventually repay me.

I can’t say I was surprised when Leo and Laraine divorced. I learned a lesson, and I imagine Laraine did as well.

But back to Roz.

Buoyant, smart, the life of every party, she maintained her joie de vivre in spite of professional dry spells and, later, bad health. When her movie career began to decline in the early 1950s, she took a part in the national tour of John Van Druten’s play Bell, Book and Candle. Movie stars might do a play in New York, but with the exception of Henry Fonda, they didn’t tour with them. But Roz got great reviews, which led to her being cast in the Leonard Bernstein show Wonderful Town, which in turn led to her creating the role of Auntie Mame in 1956, which was followed by the movie.

Roz was up for anything, and I loved that about her. She was interested in politics—Roz was a moderate Republican, a fan of Eisenhower’s—was a great baseball fan, following the Dodgers religiously, first when they were in Brooklyn, more so after they moved to Los Angeles. She even had season tickets.

She excelled at playing madcap characters, even though she was actually a deeply sensible person. At Christmas, she would have a group of friends over for a big Scandinavian meal—a gesture to Freddie. Each guest would be given a paper bag filled with costume jewelry, ribbons, and some straight pins. The lights would be turned off, some candles would be lit, and everyone would have the task of making some kind of hat out of the items in their bag.

When the lights were turned on, there would be Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper wearing a goofy creation on his head.

Roz got cancer in the early 1960s and had a mastectomy. After that came a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis. The steroids she took to alleviate the discomfort caused her to puff up. It affected her looks but also seemed to slow her down emotionally. She made her last picture in 1971, a not very good movie called Mrs. Pollifax–Spy that she wrote herself. Roz died five years later, and I served along with Cary Grant as a pallbearer. It was something I was happy to do for one of the brightest lights of Hollywood, as well as one of the great ladies of show business.

 • • • 

One of the prime differences between the actresses of that generation and the modern variety was their sense of the grand manner—they lived high and they lived large. They developed entourages that were every bit the equal of those of their male counterparts, but with a subtle difference. The chums of male stars were drinking buddies or pals they could blow off steam with. Errol Flynn was an Aussie—well, technically he was Tasmanian, but close enough—and his pals tended not to be actors or studio people, but stuntmen and various hangers-on. But the people female stars counted on were usually connected with them professionally in some way. I’ve mentioned, for example, how Barbara Stanwyck depended on Helen Ferguson, her publicist.

Then there were people like Sydney Guilaroff. He was the leading hairdresser to the stars, and he had a clientele that numbered dozens of major actresses as well as professional hostesses. A star’s personal hairdresser took precedence over whoever was in charge of that kind of thing at any studio, because they usually brought their core group of support professionals with them—hairdresser, makeup person, and so forth. For the stars, it was a kind of security blanket—they knew that their team had only their best interests at heart and weren’t prone to studio politics. Their loyalty was to one person and one person only.

Actresses told Sydney everything. About everybody. Women told him about their husbands, their lovers, because they knew he would never break a confidence. And he never did. Even when he wrote a memoir at the end of his life, he was circumspect; if Sydney had wanted to tell the truth, he could have burned the town down.

 • • • 

I got to know Jennifer Jones in the 1970s, when we did The Towering Inferno together. It was her last picture, and I would classify her as . . . interesting. Personally, Jennifer liked me; I had worked with her son, Robert Walker Jr., and we got along very well. Jennifer appreciated that.

I think she spent her career in terror of her profession. Jennifer’s real name was Phylis Isley, and she was the daughter of a prominent movie exhibitor in Oklahoma and Texas. He showed a lot of pictures made by Republic, the B-movie studio where John Wayne spent more than fifteen years. Jennifer wanted to be an actress, and since Republic wanted to keep Phil Isley happy, they were happy to give his daughter a beginner’s acting contract for seventy-five dollars a week.

She made a serial, and a couple of Westerns, and before you know it she was picked up by Selznick and Fox, where she made The Song of Bernadette. Suddenly this little girl from the Southwest was swimming in very turbulent waters. It wasn’t easy for her.

Jennifer had a trusting, childlike quality. I was told that the great director King Vidor figured out that to get her in the proper place for the work on Duel in the Sun, he had to begin each morning by telling her the story of the movie right up to the scenes they were going to shoot that day. Each day’s shooting was a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, and Jennifer needed to know precisely which piece of the puzzle she was doing. At that stage in her life, her self-image was not that of a professional actress but of a little girl who was in far over her head. Being invited to Jennifer’s was like going to a hospital ward. For one thing, she would be late for her own dinner. Not ten minutes, but an hour or an hour and a half. She was into Reichian therapy at that point.

I don’t honestly know if she ever got over her fears. Years before I got to know Jennifer, I had watched her perform a scene from Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing at the Fox studio. I noticed that the hem of her dress was fluttering because her knees were shaking so badly. Off to the side of the set, you could see her then-husband, David Selznick, hovering, watching his wife protectively. Bill Holden, her costar, was fond of her, but he couldn’t help but be aware of her anxiety.

She was very much the star, and at the same time she had an intense need for emotional security. Selznick’s death in 1965 left her unmoored for a long time. Contrary to the general opinion that Selznick smothered her, I think David gave her the protection that was absolutely necessary if she was to function at anything approaching a high level.

Jennifer Jones

David had an exaggerated personality; Elia Kazan told me a story that illustrates just how exaggerated. Gadge (Kazan’s nickname) once went to Selznick’s home on Tower Road to talk about a project. The setting couldn’t have been more impressive; the house was stunning, the servants both officious and obsequious.

After Kazan was ushered into the house, the head butler turned to one of the lesser minions and said, “Mr. Kazan to see Mr. Selznick.” (Who else would Mr. Kazan have been there to see?) The minion went away to announce Gadge to Selznick. From behind a door, Kazan heard Selznick order, “Turn on the fountain!” Kazan entered, and there was David, with the fountain pumping splendidly in the background. The picture was now complete.

You get that sense of theatrical pomp in most of David’s movies, splendid as they were and are. But David’s personality, which was directly replicated in his films, belonged to an earlier time in Hollywood; his ornate style couldn’t really adapt itself to an environment attuned to acting that was less than grand, or values that were more down market than Gone with the Wind or Since You Went Away. The great movies of the 1950s—I’m thinking of High Noon, On the Waterfront, From Here to Eternity, Marty, The Sweet Smell of Success, The Searchers—couldn’t have been made by David if you’d held a gun to his head. He might have appreciated them, but he would never have wanted to spend a year or two of his life making them.

So David and Jennifer were gradually marooned on an island of their own choosing, of the grand and glorious old Hollywood.

 • • • 

Another of the women of this era I knew and grew fond of was Ida Lupino. Ida was actually English, and came from a notable performing family. Her uncle, Lupino Lane, was a very successful comedian in the music halls and West End, as was her dad, Stanley Lupino. Ida’s godfather was Ivor Novello, the composer and matinee idol who wrote “Keep the Home Fires Burning” during World War I.

Ida came to Hollywood in the 1930s, but didn’t spend all that much time with the British colony. She grew close to David Niven, but then everybody did, because that’s the kind of person David was.

She made a big impression in Bill Wellman’s The Light That Failed. Wellman and star Ronald Colman disliked each other from the first day of production—Colman had wanted a different actress to play opposite him, and when Wellman got his way in casting Ida, Colman made his displeasure known. Ida was left pretty much alone, and responded by sculpting a very dynamic portrayal.

Soon afterward, she went to Warner Bros., where she started off with a big hit: They Drive by Night, a tough Raoul Walsh movie about truck drivers, followed by High Sierra with Bogart. Ida had the right temperament for that studio—she was a scrapper—but the timing of her arrival was off. Bette Davis was then the unquestioned reigning leading lady, and Ida had to make do with a lot of scripts that Bette turned down. After Joan Crawford came to the lot, the situation got even worse for Ida.

Ida told me that there was never any open warfare between her and Warners’ top actresses. She said that Bette had asked her to play the part of the nasty girl in The Corn Is Green, the one who tries to keep the boy in his miserable little town in Wales, but Ida had already been cast in another picture. Ida had a lot of respect for Bette, and would have liked to work with her, but I don’t know—the part in The Corn Is Green would have been the heavy, opposite Bette’s noble schoolteacher. Bette would have wanted a strong actress in the role, so long as there was no question of who was going to be vanquished at the end. Also, Ida might have been too old for the part.

Ida Lupino

Nevertheless, Ida did get some good roles at Warners—there was The Sea Wolf, and she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress for The Hard Way, a film she hated making and that not enough people know about even today.

But eventually Ida got tired of always being low woman on the totem pole, so she decided to leave Warners. Jack Warner wanted to sign her up for another seven years, but she wanted out.

“Seven years and no options, Ida. Fifty-two weeks a year,” Jack said.

“No,” said Ida.

Jack immediately slipped into his aggressive mode. “All right, I’m going to tell you something. You’ll never act at this studio again.” And she never did.

Years later, when Ida directed a couple of TV shows at Warners, she reminded Jack of his vow. “That’s directing, not acting,” he replied. It was clear that he didn’t care about television at all except insofar as it made money for the studio.

After leaving Warners, Ida went over to Fox, where she made Road House. She didn’t stay there long and she always regretted it; she believed that the great mistake of her acting career was departing Fox at the end of the 1940s. She would go on and on about how much she respected Darryl Zanuck and was in awe of his ability to read every draft of every script, and look not only at the rushes of all the pictures in production, but even at wardrobe tests. People usually say that if they had their life to live over again, they wouldn’t change a thing. Not Ida—she always wished she’d stayed with Zanuck.

Ida’s prerequisite for a role was that the character she played had to have guts. Straight female leads, girl parts, where the character hovered around waiting for the leading man to do something, she hated. She either refused them or did them badly. Like Bette Davis, she was constitutionally incapable of gazing adoringly at the leading man unless he earned it. Since there are occasions when every actress has to do just that, it was a real limitation on her career. From the things Ida told me, she was well aware of that restraint but wasn’t bitter about it.

Instead, she began directing. She would always insist that moving into that role wasn’t intentional on her part. She had cowritten a movie with her husband, and it had just started production when the director they had hired had a heart attack. They had to get a substitute and fast, so Ida stepped up. The original director, a gent from the silent days named Elmer Clifton, remained on the set guiding her to keep her from making any mistakes with her setups, so Ida and her husband felt he was entitled to his credit. The picture finished on time, and the reviews were good, so Ida kept directing.

If you look at her movies today, you can see that she was influenced by some of the tough old pros she had worked for, guys like Wellman and Walsh. Ida had already been thinking about directing when she made High Sierra for Walsh. She would constantly question him about technical issues—over-the-shoulder shots and eyeline matches, things that Walsh had been doing for so long that it was as automatic as rolling his own cigarette, which I saw him do with one hand.

Ida directed only six pictures, but none of them was bad, and one of them—The Hitch-Hiker—was excellent, an unsettling, nasty movie about a psycho on the loose. Ida was very conscious of the fact that she was the only woman director in Hollywood at this time. It was a tenuous position, and she adopted a canny would-you-please-help-me-out attitude toward her all-male crews. I’m not sure this was entirely sincere on Ida’s part. She was in all other respects a ballsy woman, not a shrinking violet in any way, but she probably felt it was necessary for her continued survival. The crew is particularly important on a low-budget picture—if they slow down even a little bit, you won’t finish on time, and that can be a disaster.

All of Ida’s pictures were similar to the movies Darryl Zanuck had been making in the early 1930s at Warners—stories spun off from current events and social problems. Not Wanted was about unmarried mothers, Outrage dealt with a rape, The Bigamist was the story of, well, a bigamist. The spice of the subject matter helped make up for the low budgets.

If The Hitch-Hiker had Anthony Mann’s or John Sturges’s name on it as director, it would have given their careers a big boost, but it didn’t really do much for Ida. All of her pictures were low-budget B’s, and she couldn’t manage to climb out of that particular ghetto.

Ida had the same problem that a lot of independent producers had—the system was set up by the studios for the studios, not the independents. Howard Hughes liked Ida’s films and gave her financing and distribution through RKO, but she and her husband had to give up 50 percent of the profits in return. Since Ida’s pictures were made for about $150,000 apiece, she couldn’t afford big stars, which in turn meant that they got limited playing time, usually in double features. There was a ceiling on the money they could earn. Ida made enough money to keep going, but that was about all.

Except for the fact that her pictures weren’t particularly commercial, I’ve always thought Ida would have been good at running a studio. She was smart and savvy—not the same things, by the way—and had a solid, realistic big-picture sense of the movie industry.

She also had an eye for scripts and an eye for talent; in 1952, she hired an art director named Harry Horner to direct a little movie for RKO. Horner had worked with Max Reinhardt in Europe and done beautiful work on pictures like The Heiress, for which he won an Oscar. Beware, My Lovely, the movie he did for Ida, was quite good. (Horner was the father of James Horner, the late composer who wrote so many great movie scores, including the Oscar-winning score for James Cameron’s Titanic.)

I’m sure there was some entrenched prejudice against her as a woman director, not because she was a woman per se, but because she was trying to break into the boys’ club. And there was another factor. When Ida started directing, Hollywood was being buffeted by a rapidly diminishing audience. Television was siphoning off a lot of the public, and the low-budget pictures Ida was directing couldn’t break through in any large way. The studios began making fewer and fewer B movies, and the ones they were releasing veered toward exploitation pictures from producers like American International. Ida didn’t want to do that kind of work. Her company, Filmmakers, tried to distribute its own pictures in order to make more money, but the plan failed and they went out of business. Ida, like a lot of male directors, had to go into TV in order to keep working.

She proved to be more successful in television than she had in movies, and her work was solid. She did all kinds of shows, including some that were by no means earmarked for female directors, as was common at that time. Ida directed episodes of tough, suspense-oriented series like The Twilight Zone, Thriller, The Fugitive, The Untouchables, and Have Gun, Will Travel, as well as some relationship-based programs.

The interesting thing was that the shows that were actually run by women—Loretta Young, Donna Reed—didn’t hire Ida. She couldn’t get work that was tagged for female audiences.

I don’t think she cared, particularly; she just thought it was ironic.

I always got a subliminal feeling that Ida felt that she had shortchanged her acting career by moving into directing. She directed herself only once, in The Bigamist, and she didn’t like it. She said that it took all her concentration just to direct, and she couldn’t divide her attention between being in front of and behind the camera.

I spent a fair amount of time with Ida in Hawaii, when she was married to Howard Duff. She was a great deal of fun—outgoing and vivacious. She was a middle-aged woman at the time, twelve years older than I was, but I found her very sexy. Nothing happened, but if we’d both been single I suspect it might have. Both Ida and Howard drank pretty heavily when I knew them, and the bottle became a serious problem later in Ida’s life.

I worked with Ida on television, in an episode of It Takes a Thief in which she was a guest star. Despite the fact that her career had narrowed considerably by then, she came in prepared and was totally professional. Just like the other actresses of her generation, she was demanding about things like wardrobe and camera. It wasn’t surprising—they knew that presentation was vital; a bad wardrobe could hurt you, and bad lighting could kill you. It was a trait I would also notice in Bette Davis.

 • • • 

As a movie-struck kid, my favorite actresses were Barbara Stanwyck and Paulette Goddard, for entirely different reasons. I loved Paulette’s pictures for Chaplin and DeMille, in which she radiated a healthy sexuality. I was just hitting puberty, and she aroused all sorts of illicit thoughts in my hyperactive teenage mind. But Barbara hit me on the emotional level; when she was acting, she wasn’t selling anything, she was just telling the truth.

I’ve written about Barbara Stanwyck in great detail in Pieces of My Heart, and I don’t want to repeat myself here. I’ll simply say that the relationship that began during the filming of 1953’s Titanic was one of a handful of transformative experiences in my life. It taught me many things, one of them being how important work was to this generation of actresses. I’ve mentioned how many of them grew up without fathers or had bad relationships with them, which meant that these young girls and women had usually been the sole support of their families. Work was more than their identity—it meant survival, and that was complicated by the fact that leading ladies in that era had shorter careers than leading men.

That was emphatically the case with Barbara. She loved to work and emotionally she needed to work. She had been very poor as a child and young woman, so money translated into security for her.

Work always improved her mood. When she was preparing for a part, or actually shooting, she would become noticeably more animated. (I confess to having some of these traits myself.) Barbara worked terribly hard on a script. She would memorize all the dialogue, not just her own lines, and she would mentally build an arc for her character, so that she would make emotional as well as dramatic sense as she moved through her scenes. She was an actress who took a specific approach to her craft.

Barbara Stanwyck

Whether it was a movie or TV show didn’t seem to make much difference to her; she just wanted to keep acting. And the fact was that, after a certain point, she was no longer offered films, but still got roles on television, which is where the audience that had grown up with her had migrated. Since she loved Westerns, she was quite happy making The Big Valley, even though a lot of people thought the show was beneath her. But then almost any TV series would have been beneath Barbara—certainly one of the two or three best film actresses of her time.

Living with someone like Barbara at an early stage in my life made me appreciate the vulnerability of even strong women in a way that would have been impossible had I been associating strictly with younger women.

When you’re a kid, you’re confident that you’ll never fail, you’ll never die. But loving Barbara, and knowing some of the older actresses I’ve talked about, made me realize that people can be crushed, and time and disappointment can make them become something other than their best selves.

One of the big might-have-beens in Barbara’s life was losing the female lead in The Fountainhead, a picture she very much wanted to do. She had actually taken the property to Henry Blanke at Warner Bros., for whom she had done My Reputation. Blanke and she had hit it off, so she wanted to work with him again.

The Fountainhead was set up to star Bogart and Stanwyck until King Vidor was assigned to direct. Vidor had made a lot of great pictures, and Jack Warner gave him a fair amount of authority. Vidor simply didn’t think Barbara was sexy enough to play the part of Dominique. This was brutal and it was also unexpected, as Barbara and Vidor had worked together so magnificently on Stella Dallas a dozen or so years earlier. Of course, Stella Dallas is a character part, not a sexy role. (It has one of the great endings in movie history, as Stella strides proudly away from her daughter’s wedding. With her girl taken care of, Stella’s work is done, and she can go on to the next thing.)

Bogart eventually drifted away from The Fountainhead and was replaced by Gary Cooper, and on came Patricia Neal to take the female lead. Pat Neal was indeed beautiful, and she was also quite a bit younger than Barbara. Gary and Pat flared up into a huge affair, even though the picture itself wasn’t very good.

Barbara’s attitude toward all this was philosophical. She didn’t like being rejected, of course, but her attitude was “What are you going to do? You have to take these things in stride.”

It’s an attitude that became my own and has stayed with me all these years. She was right—if we didn’t take such setbacks in stride, the streets would quickly fill up with the bodies of actors committing suicide. Every actor or actress who ever lived, every great star, has lost parts he or she would have killed to play. It’s the nature of the business.

Barbara taught me that all you can really ask for is your share of at bats. If you get up to the plate enough times, you’ll get your hits, and if you’re at all lucky, some of them will be home runs. Certainly, that was the case with Barbara; with the possible exception of Kate Hepburn, no actress of her generation is remembered with more affection . . . and respect. I’m no different from anybody else—I have endless respect for her. But I also love her.

 • • • 

How to describe June Allyson to someone who never saw her? She was a little like Meg Ryan in that her appeal was a matter of being young, perky, and approachable. June was really Ella Geisman from the Bronx—another poor kid whose father deserted the family. For emotional sustenance, June went to the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and got a role in her first film in 1937, when she was only twenty years old.

From there it was on to Broadway, rising in the cast list until she appeared in Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie in 1940, where she understudied Betty Hutton. When Hutton got sick one night. Allyson went on, and George Abbott realized he had a star in the making—June could sing and dance! Abbott put together Best Foot Forward just for June, and that took her to Hollywood.

She was a hit almost immediately in light comedies and musicals like Good News, although MGM also used her in occasional dramas like Little Women. After that she worked a lot with Jimmy Stewart—The Stratton Story, The Glenn Miller Story. In 1955, she appeared in the box office top ten, but after that roles became sparse for June, because tastes started to change and because there was really room for only one perky blonde, and by then that spot was taken by Doris Day.

In my mind, I always bracketed June with Van Johnson. They both became stars during World War II and they had the same sort of image—cute, happy-go-lucky, the boy and girl next door. That the image had only coincidental resemblance to the people they actually were was irrelevant; happy-go-lucky was what the public was buying during the war, so that’s the way June and Van were sold. But June kept at it, working in TV, dinner theater, whatever the market offered. She always made a living.

I knew June well; in fact, we used the house she had lived in with her husband Dick Powell as the house Stefanie Powers and I lived in in Hart to Hart. June was fun and, to be honest, rather flirtatious.

Because Dick was widely liked and respected, nobody seemed interested in seeing if there was any actual intent behind June’s flirtatiousness, but lightning struck when she made The McConnell Story with Alan Ladd. Nobody really knows what goes on in anybody else’s marriage, but June must have had some degree of discontent, and Alan had been unhappy with his wife, Sue Carol, for years.

Sue had been an actress at the tail end of the silent days, a cute little thing with some of Clara Bow’s irrepressible spirit. But she didn’t like talkies—or talkies didn’t like her—so in 1939 she became an agent. She had a client list that included Peter Lawford, Rory Calhoun, and Sheila Ryan.

Alan had been happily married to his first wife when Sue heard him on the radio one day. She fell in love with his voice before she fell in love with him. She called the radio station and set up a meeting, and that was that. Alan was gorgeous: blond hair, green eyes, a tight swimmer’s body. Sue was a goner.

I don’t know that Alan had the same deep feelings for Sue that she had for him, but he went along with her infatuation, probably because he thought she might be able to get him into the movie business in a big way. He divorced his wife and, in 1942, married Sue—and became her fourth husband. That same year, she got him the lead in This Gun for Hire, a film I later remade for television.

That movie fired the starting gun for Alan’s starring career, which culminated in 1952 and Shane, in which he gives a lovely performance. That movie was something of an accident—Paramount had given him bad scripts for years before that, so he had already decided to leave the studio when he made Shane. He went over to Warners for 10 percent of the gross on all the pictures he made for them, as well as ownership of the negative—probably the richest deal in the business at the time. Later, Natalie made a movie for Alan’s company, a little B called A Cry in the Night, with Edmond O’Brien.

Alan was at Warner Bros. when he met June Allyson. Their affair became an open secret. Somebody who worked on the picture told me that Sue Carol would barge onto the stage where her husband was filming, bang on Alan’s dressing room door, and yell, “Alan, come on out. I know you’re in there!”

He fell in love with June, but neither of them was willing to divorce. Alan was already drinking at that point, and the wear and tear was beginning to show in his face. June went back to Dick Powell until Dick died in 1963, while Alan stayed with Sue. And then his drinking really picked up.

I got to know Sue and Alan before he made The McConnell Story, when I dated Carol Lee, Sue’s daughter from a previous marriage. They both approved of me as a potential match, and Sue, a little round-faced woman, six years older than Alan, couldn’t have been nicer, while I couldn’t have been happier with Carol Lee.

Alan died from an overdose of pills in 1964, and it was generally felt that he committed suicide, even though his death was officially ruled accidental. (There had been another incident about eighteen months earlier, when Alan had been wounded by a self-inflicted gunshot.)

He had been terribly self-conscious about almost everything—his talent, his height, the decline in his career. In fact, at five foot six, he wasn’t all that short. There were plenty of actors who were shorter—Chaplin and Cagney, among others—but it didn’t bother them the way it bothered Alan. And I think he might also have been consumed by a terrible guilt over how he treated his first wife, whom I gathered he loved very much.

When I knew them, Alan and Sue seemed content, if not blissful. Whatever was plaguing her husband, Sue was unable to remedy it. She never remarried.

As for June, after Dick died, she remarried and kept as busy as she could. In retrospect, I think she was a far more interesting woman than her screen image, or the times, ever allowed her to show. The times were changing, and the girl next door was moving away from the movies and into television. But, for a time, June was America’s ideal young woman.